A Different Athlete

Thought you might enjoy reading some tidbits of notes that I've written in my Training Peaks account the last few days...

I expected to feel super strong this morning after several easy days but interestingly I did not...

blah. felt like a lethargic elephant this morning.

super slow jogging but didn't feel easy??

Missing 10-20W off what I would have expected- Just felt weak.

I felt like shit and was swimming sloooow. BLAH. I looked at my watch once to see how bad it was on one of the 'fast' 50's... saw 43" and then just stopped looking.

power meter crapped out after ~3 hours but no big deal I didn't like my power numbers today anyway.

was pissy in my own head

still super windy so I swore out loud a lot and wasn't loving my bike

blah. well there you go, I'm 3 for 3 in shitty training sessions today. I'm fairly certain this is not excess training fatigue but rather pissy PMS hormones. I'm just all around in a bad mood today negative thoughts, etc and I'm not 'tired' per say just BLAH.

All better today. Estrogen is magic. Seriously. The difference in how I think and how my brain works today vs yesterday is night and day.

100x better than yesterday

physically I felt strong today and mentally I were there too. solid ride

This actually felt great!

Can you tell what happened there?? Mama was PMSing. It was an ugly 3 days or so Sunday-Tuesday... By Tuesday I had it figured out what was going on so I wasn't necessarily beating myself up over my crap training sessions b/c I understood by then what was happening... but yikes I was still super pissy and negative. I actually thought my cycle wasn't going to start until today (Thurs) so my expectation was that yesterday would be ugly too, so you can imagine my surprise when I woke up and smiled and realized that I didn't feel awful. Hmmm. Turns out, I started a day early. For me, the day I start my new cycle is like magic- I tend to feel like Superwoman immediately and that's exactly how it played out this month as well. I am a completely different athlete when I am PMSing vs when I am not.

Anyway, I suppose different women respond in different ways to monthly hormonal shifts... I've been paying close enough attention to mine for several years now that I've got it pretty down pat. I put a little * in my TP calendar on the day I predict I'm going to start the next month and that way if/when several days before that I notice I'm feeling fat, grumpy, slow, or whatever I can at least understand it even if I cannot change it.

Another funny thing is when I'm able to tell when some of my female athletes are PMSing as well. I'm not really a mind reader or anything... But when they wrote stuff like Feeling like a fat ass today, well, it's pretty obvious! Ha! And I'm only laughing b/c I've written those exact same notes before! :)

I guess my point here is that paying attention and understanding these hormonal shifts and cycles is really key to cutting yourself some slack on your shitty PMS days. Without that understanding of what was actually happening to me hormonally, my coach might be scratching his head a little trying to understand why I didn't respond well to the little rest block he prescribed (yes I tell my coach- poor guy- BUT I think it's important he knows even if he doesn't totally get it- at least then we don't question/blame the training plan, you know?)

You want to know the really great news? I'm finally, for once, NOT going to be PMSing while racing an Ironman! My last 3 Ironmans have happened 1-2 days prior to the start of a new cycle. I have high hopes that means I'm actually going to have an Ironman that just might reflect my training. So.Super.Stoked about that! :))))